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02/16/2015

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NASA has selected 14 small satellites from 12 states to fly as auxiliary payloads aboard rockets planned to launch in 2016, 2017 and 2018. The proposed CubeSats come from universities across the country, non-profit organizations and NASA field centers. Arizona State University was one of the institutions selected for sponsoring a satellite.

The selections are part of the sixth round of NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative. CubeSats are a class of research spacecraft called nanosatellites. The cube-shaped satellites vary in size from large coffee mugs to shoeboxes. The selected satellites are eligible for placement on a launch manifest after final negotiations, depending on the availability of a flight opportunity. The ASU satellite is expected to be flight ready by May, 2016.

The ASU project is called the Asteroid Origins Satellite, or AOSAT I. It is a science laboratory that will be the world’s first CubeSat microgravity laboratory. It will enable a unique set of science and technology experiments to answer fundamental questions of how the solar system formed and understand the surface dynamics of asteroids and comets. Once launched, it will be in space for at least eight months if not longer, depending on the orbit.

“There is great and growing interest in exploring the native environment of asteroids,” says ASU Professor Erik Asphaug. “Instead of a billion-dollar mission taking a decade to develop, we have decided to build a low cost ‘patch of asteroid’ in orbit, not as a substitute for an asteroid mission but as a testbed for validating – reducing the cost and risk – of mission concepts related to asteroid deflection, sample return, and resource utilization.”

About the same size as a loaf of bread, AOSAT I was designed by a collaborative team centered in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, headed by science principal investigator Asphaug, and engineering principal investigator Jekan Thanga, a roboticist and an assistant professor. The team also includes researchers from partner institutions, including, JPL, University of Maryland, and University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The ASU team’s roster boasts student talent as well. Jack Lightholder (computer science major) serves as the project engineer and Viranga Perera (SESE PhD student) is the project scientist. Between 2014 and 2017, a total of 32 undergraduates will be involved, along with 15 master’s students, three PhD students and two postdocs. The students work as part of SpaceTREx (Space and Terrestrial Robotic Exploration Laboratory) and the Planetary Formation Lab, headed by Thanga and Asphaug, respectively.

“Talented students under direct supervision of faculty members work on many of the critical subsystems for AOSAT 1. They are an integral part of the team. Many are multi-talented individuals, who I would have trouble distinguishing from professionals,” said Thanga.

The program is providing students and young professionals with the opportunity to participate from start to finish like never before in satellite missions. AOSAT I seeks to combine science and engineering to produce a whole line of CubeSat science laboratories in space. The potential applications spread beyond planetary sciences into life-sciences and long duration human survival in space. According to Thanga, the hope is to spin-off these capabilities into future partnerships with the student-led Sun Devil Satellite Laboratory and Dust Devils.

“One of the great things about AOSAT is that its life cycle is comparable to the tour-of-duty of a student at ASU. This makes it a highly tangible experience, where a student can design an experiment and fly it in space, and collect and analyze the data, all as part of a thesis project. This is way outside the box of standard missions, and will set the pace for student-led missions to come,” says Asphaug.

AOSAT I will be assembled in the Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building IV (ISTB 4) clean room, which provide state-of-the-art facilities for the design, construction, assembly and testing of small spacecraft. In parallel, the NewSpace Initiative (https://newspace.asu.edu/) headed by Professor Jim Bell is coordinating efforts to rebuild ASU’s satellite ground station. A mission control center for AOSAT 1 and future ASU led CubeSat missions will be housed on the ground floor of ISTB 4. This will enable ASU to join an elite club consisting of a handful of government institutions, private entities and universities in having complete control of the space mission in house.

Image: Arizona State University researchers build their own “patch of asteroid” inside of a small spinning satellite seen here in this artist rendering. Credit: Sean Amidan

Earth is nearly 4,000 miles deep, and other than the outermost few miles, is inaccessible to humans. Seismology is the only tool to accurately image the deep interior of Earth. Over the last few decades, seismologists have used the tool of seismic tomography to map out the interior of Earth (much like medical CT scan tomography to image the human body).

Ed Garnero, a geophysicist at Arizona State University, will share his research on Earth’s dynamic interior at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting on Feb. 13.

For nearly 30 years, Garnero has focused his research on the area between Earth’s uppermost mantle to the innermost core.

In his lecture “Interpreting Earth's Largest Internal Seismic Anomalies: Deep Thermochemical Piles,” Garnero will discuss how modern research shows that many surface processes on our planet are related to dynamic phenomena within. He will be sharing cutting-edge images of Earth's interior, which reveal two massive continental-sized blobs half-way to Earth's center that likely relate to where the most massive eruptions happen at Earth's surface.

“One blob is located beneath the Pacific Ocean, the other is nearly on the opposite side of Earth, beneath the Atlantic and part of the African continent,” says Garnero, a professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. “The massive blobs are important because they appear to play a role in convective processes, including where mantle plumes originate – plumes are thought to give rise to Earth's hotspot volcanoes.”

Observations, modeling and predictions show the inner Earth to be chemically complex and continuously churning and changing. Tomographic images constructed from seismic wave readings point to differences in the speeds of waves that go through the mantle. This difference in wave speeds provides a sort of map of the major boundaries inside the mantle – where hot areas are, where cold areas are, where there are regions that might be a different composition, etc.

“These continent sized blobs have properties that result in seismic waves traveling more sluggishly through them,” explains Garnero. “Our recent research adds to the body of knowledge that supports these blobs being chemically distinct from the rest of the mantle rock.”

It’s been more than 40 years since astronauts returned the last Apollo samples from the moon, and since then those samples have undergone some of the most extensive and comprehensive analysis of any geological collection. A team led by ASU researchers has now refined the timeline of meteorite impacts on the moon through a pioneering application of laser microprobe technology to Apollo 17 samples.

Impact cratering is the most ubiquitous geologic process affecting the solid surfaces of planetary bodies in the solar system. The moon’s scarred surface serves as a record of meteorite bombardment that spans much of solar system history. Developing an absolute chronology of lunar impact events is of particular interest because the moon is an important proxy for understanding the early bombardment history of Earth, which has been largely erased by plate tectonics and erosion, and because we can use the lunar impact record to infer the ages of other cratered surfaces in the inner solar system.

Researchers in ASU’s Group 18 Laboratories, headed by Professor Kip Hodges, used an ultraviolet laser microprobe attached to a high-sensitivity mass spectrometer to analyze argon isotopes in samples returned by Apollo 17. While the laser microprobe 40Ar/39Ar technique has been applied to a large number of problems in terrestrial geochronology, including studies of texturally complex samples, this is its first time it has been applied to samples from the Apollo archive.

The samples analyzed by the ASU team are known as lunar impact melt breccias — mash-ups of glass, rock and crystal fragments that were created by impact events on the moon’s surface.

When a meteor strikes another planetary body, the impact produces very large amounts of energy, some of which goes into shock heating and melting the target rocks. These extreme conditions can ‘restart the clock’ for some mineral-isotopic chronometers, particularly for material melted during impact. As a result, the absolute ages of lunar craters are primarily determined through isotope geochronology of components of the target rocks that were shocked and heated to the point of melting, and which have since solidified.

However, lunar rocks may have experienced multiple impact events over the course of billions of years of bombardment, potentially complicating attempts to date samples and relate the results to the ages of particular impact structures.

Conventional wisdom holds that the largest impact basins on the moon were responsible for generating the vast majority of impact melts, and therefore that nearly all of the samples dated must be related to the formation of those basins.

While it is true that enormous quantities of impact melt are generated by basin-scale impact events, recent images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera confirm that even small craters with diameters on the order of 100 meters can generate impact melts. The team’s findings have important implications for this particular observation. The results are published in the inaugural issue of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s newest journal, Science Advances, on Feb. 12.

“One of the samples we analyzed, 77115, records evidence for only one impact event, which may or may not be related to a basin-forming impact event. In contrast, we found that the other sample, 73217, preserves evidence for at least three impact events occurring over several hundred million years, not all of which can be related to basin-scale impacts,” says Cameron Mercer, lead author of the paper and a graduate student in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

Sample 77115, collected by astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt at Station 7 during their third and final moonwalk, records a single melt-forming event about 3.83 billion years ago. Sample 73217, retrieved at Station 3 during the astronauts’ second moonwalk, preserves evidence for at least three distinct impact melt-forming events occurring between 3.81 billion years ago and 3.27 billion years ago. The findings suggest that a single small sample can preserve multiple generations of melt products created by impact events over the course of billions of years.

“Our results emphasize the need for care in how we analyze samples in the context of impact dating, particularly for those samples that appear to have complex, polygenetic origins. This applies to both the samples that we currently have in our lunar and meteoritic collections, as well as samples that we recover during future human and robotic space exploration missions in the inner solar system,” says Mercer.

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Image caption: Photomicrograph of a petrographic thin section of a piece of a coherent, crystalline impact melt breccia collected from landslide material at the base of the South Massif, Apollo 17 (sample 73217, 84). Different mineral and lithic clasts, as well as impact melt phases are evident. Determining the ages of different melt components in such a complex rock requires carefully focused analyses within context of spatial and petrographic information such as this. In their article published in the Feb. 12 issue of Science Advances, Mercer et al. used the laser microprobe 40Ar/39Ar technique to investigate age relationships of three of the distinct generations of impact melt shown in this image.

Radically new visions of the future will be showcased as part of Arizona State University's Emerge 2015 – a one-day event featuring visionary Jad Abumrad, host of the award-winning show Radiolab, and 10 spellbinding "visitations from the future," including theatrical performances, improvisation, games, dance and hands-on opportunities to design and build the future.

Part performance, part hands-on interactive experience, the annual Emerge event explores the ways we are already creating the future, and asks us to think about how we ensure it is the future we hope for – rather than one we dread.

The theme of Emerge 2015 is The Future of Choices and Values.

“Humans today have unprecedented power to harness and reshape matter, energy and even life itself. Emerge asks what kinds of futures we should build together, at a moment in history when what we can do is almost unlimited,” said Joel Garreau, founding co-director of Emerge and professor of law, culture and values at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

Exploring the unknown

Emerge dares brilliant creative and technical minds to bring questions about the future to life through performance, technology and storytelling. The event gathers artists, designers, scientists, engineers and audiences to imagine optimistic, thoughtful futures.

Each of the 10 “visitations from the future,” as well as the performance by Abumrad, are different ways of responding to the open question about what kind of futures we can envision, and what kind of futures we want. Because the teams behind each of the visitations are drawn from such diverse backgrounds, their answers could not be more different.

“There’s a really wide range of experiences at Emerge this year," said Megan Halpern, director of collaboration and research for Emerge 2015. "I’m especially excited to see how seriously Emerge takes the idea of play, and how the teams are incorporating opportunities for the audience to express their ideas creatively.”

Abumrad, the headliner for this year’s event, is the creator and host of Radiolab, the popular public radio show about “curiosity,” broadcast on over 500 stations across the nation and downloaded more than 9 million times a month as a podcast. In his Peabody Award-winning program, Abumrad combines journalism, storytelling, dialogue and music to craft compositions of exploration and discovery.

At Emerge, his exciting performance, called “Gut Churn” – which includes video and live sound manipulation – begins with a simple question: What does it mean to “innovate?” How does it feel to make something new in the world?

On one level, this is a personal story of how Abumrad invented a new aesthetic. On another, it is a clinic in the art of storytelling. On a third and more profound level, the lecture is the result of a three-year investigation into the science, philosophy and art of uncertainty, which all began with the two words in his title – gut churn. What use do negative feelings have during the creative process? Do those feelings get in the way, or do they propel us forward?

Event details

The event is set to take place from 3 p.m. to midnight, March 6, at the university's SkySong Innovation Center in Scottsdale, and is free and open to the public, with registration requested through asuemerge2015.eventbrite.com.

In addition to Abumrad, a host of talented artists, thinkers and creators, will be in attendance including Jonathon Keats, conceptual artist, Forbes art critic and novelist; Don Marinelli, co-founder of the world-renowned Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center (ETC); Rachel Bowditch, theater director and associate professor at ASU’s School of Film, Dance and Theatre; Toby Fraley, Pittsburgh-based artist and creator of the exhibition The Secret Life of Robots; Megan Halpern, co-founder of Redshift Productions, an arts-science performance and outreach company and postdoctoral researcher at ASU’s Center for Nanotechnology in Society; and many others.

Emerge 2015’s ASU sponsors and partners include the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts; the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability; the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes; the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering; the Center for Science and the Imagination; the SkySong Innovation Center; the Office of the President; the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development; the School of Earth and Space Exploration; the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law; LightWorks; and the ASU Art Museum. Additional sponsors and partners include KJZZ 91.5, Scottsdale Public Art, Whole Foods Market and the Arizona SciTech Festival.

The 10 visitations from the future featured at Emerge 2015 are:

Bodies for a Global Brain, created by Eben Portnoy, Zoe Sandoval and Jeff Burke

A performative vision of a future in which humans connect their consciousness to global cloud computing networks, seeking connectedness and enlightenment. Originally funded by Google and presented by students from UCLA, the performance integrates Google Glass wearable devices with live theater.

What if we could teach robots to dance? How would it change the relationship between humans and machines? ASU roboticists and performance artists are taking on that challenge using the Baxter industrial robot.

Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA, created by Donald Marinelli

A one-man show about government surveillance, swarms of DIY drones and an alternative Internet, inspired by a story of the same name from ASU’s science fiction anthology "Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future" (HarperCollins, 2014), written by Lee Konstantinou.

The Happiness Project, created by Scott Cloutier

Sustainability researchers and community members explore how we can work together to build happier neighborhoods through sustainability interventions.

Future Design Studio, created by Megan Halpern

Create your own prototypes of artifacts from the future. From parking tickets to coffins, the Future Design Studio asks you to imagine what everyday objects will look like in the future, and then invites you to watch as improv performers from The Torch Theatre create the world in which your objects exist.

The Artwork Forge, created by Toby Fraley

A coin-operated robotic art-dispensing machine that scans the Internet for inspiration and creates customized paintings on 4 by 6 inch blocks of wood.

Abraxa, created by Rachel Bowditch

A roaming atmospheric performance exploring utopian experiments, dreams and the concept of the ideal city, created by Rachel Bowditch of ASU’s School of Film, Dance and Theatre.

Ariel Anbar, President's Professor in SESE, has been elected a Geochemistry Fellow by The Geochemical Society (GS) and The European Association of Geochemistry (EAG).

In 1996, The Geochemical Society and The European Association for Geochemistry established the honorary title of Geochemistry Fellow, to be bestowed upon outstanding scientists who have, over some years, made a major contribution to the field of geochemistry.

The 2015 Geochemical Fellows will receive their honor at the 2015 Goldschmidt Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, this summer.

Two secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) laboratories in the Bateman Physical Science Complex were recognized as hotbeds of scientific research, thanks to the expertise of researchers in Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (DCB). Professors Richard Hervig, Lynda Williams, and Christy Till of SESE and Professor Peter Williams and postdoctoral researcher Maitrayee Bose of DCB have been awarded $1 million over the next three years to operate their joint laboratories as a national facility for research into the Earth Sciences using this high-sensitivity microbeam analysis technique.

SIMS is an analytical tool permitting measurements of elemental concentration and isotope ratios on extremely tiny areas, so that chemical and isotopic variability on scales from a few micrometers down to several nanometers can be determined.

The spectrometers use beams of ionized atoms to focus on spots as small as 50 nanometers in size, which is less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. The ions strike the surface and blast off and ionize atoms, which are then separated by mass and measured in sensitive detectors capable of counting individual ions. The process of scanning the beam over the surface creates a high-resolution chemical and/or isotopic image of the sample.

Currently, ASU has one of the most extensive arrays of SIMS instrumentation and SIMS expertise in the world. The ASU researchers have been consistently on the leading edge of innovation in micro-elemental analysis. SIMS research at ASU dates back to 1984 with the acquisition of a Cameca (Paris) ims3f ion microscope by Peter Williams, capable of analysis in few-micrometer areas. A more modern and more powerful ims6f microscope was added in 1999 under the leadership of Hervig. Continuing the tradition of being at the leading edge of the instrumentation, Peter Williams (with Hervig, Lynda Williams and other ASU researchers) spearheaded the acquisition of a Cameca NanoSIMS instrument in 2011, with the capability to analyze areas as small as tens of nanometers.

This combination of instruments enables applications to a broad range of scientific problems, including analyses of a wide variety of natural and synthetic inorganic materials from this planet and others, semiconductors and even biological materials.

“We have been operating as an NSF-funded national facility since early 2007,” says Hervig, professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and director of the ASU SIMS facility. “The 2015 renewal allows us to continue to operate as a facility, and makes the NanoSIMS instrument as well as the existing 6f SIMS lab accessible to students, researchers and faculty.”

On the national stage, this facility is a key player in the mix of instrumentation that is required to conduct state-of-the-art microanalytical geochemistry and petrology.

The SESE researchers are widely known for applying their technique to analyze tiny grains in meteorites thought to pre-date our solar system, small fragments of explosive eruptions, clays and nanopores in oil-shale, and characterization of slow elemental and isotopic diffusion in a variety of earth materials, including volcanic minerals.

“With the ability to analyze elemental concentrations in zoned crystals on the nanometer scale using NanoSIMS, we are now able to reconstruct the life history of a magma up to just a few hours before a volcanic eruption and determine the triggers for explosive volcanic eruptions at volcanoes including Yellowstone,” says Till, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration.

Hervig has developed many SIMS techniques for geochemistry and applied them to natural samples from this and other planets as well as a variety of synthetic materials. Lynda Williams has used this technique on a range of materials at the organic/inorganic interface, specifically on the role of nanopores in understanding more about the properties of oil shales (and the environmental impact of mining them).
ASU also has built a reputation for developing novel analytical applications and instrumentation and for fundamental research aimed at understanding the ion formation process. While a central focus of the SESE researchers is on earth science problems, the lab is open to others, and the team commonly works with materials scientists and electrical engineers on campus and in the ASU Research Park, in addition to microbiologists and chemists.

Geochemists from around the world travel to the NSF-funded National SIMS Facility on ASU’s Tempe campus to use the instruments. Since 2007, from 2 to 12 people (undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, senior research scientists, and faculty) have visited the ASU facility each month. They are usually from the US, but also include visitors from other countries.

One of the anonymous proposal reviewers stated: “We all know that the devil is in the details, and it seems that the scale at which the demons operate gets smaller and smaller with each new advancement in analytical capability. Being able to analyze samples with both the normal and NanoSIMS at the ASU facility will open up new frontiers in our understanding of geological problems, and especially in the ability to examine the timescales of geologic processes.” Another reviewer lauded the facility as “one of the most creative and original SIMS labs in the nation.”

Speaking on behalf of the co-investigators, Hervig said, “We are flattered to be recognized for our scientific leadership and excited at the prospects for unprecedented nanometer-scale geochemical analyses now possible with the incorporation of the new NanoSIMS instrument into the facility. This is high praise for the senior members of the team, but we are particularly pleased that the NSF reviewers agreed with our emphasis on involving younger researchers – Till and Bose – who are pushing the limits of NanoSIMS analysis in the earth and space sciences.”

Image: Images from NanoSIMS showing the location of elements in E. coli treated with natural antibacterial clay. The images represent a cross section through bacteria (The images in B, C and D are close-ups of the yellow box indicated in A. ). The data confirm which elements are critical to the antibacterial process and shows the resolution of trace element mapping by SIMS. Images by Maitrayee Bose and research by Keith Morrison and Lynda Williams in the ASU SIMS Facility.

As one of this year’s Fulbright Scholars, ASU hydrology professor Enrique Vivoni will have an opportunity to work with some of Mexico’s leading experts in his field to advance his collaborative studies of the shared water resources between the U.S. and Mexico.

The Fulbright award will enable Vivoni to spend nine months starting in August 2015, conducting research at the Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (CICESE) in Ensenada, Baja California and the research center of CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología).

Vivoni is an associate professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, one of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Each year, the U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program awards about 800 highly sought after teaching and/or research grants to selected U.S. faculty and experienced professionals, enabling them to engage in collaborative studies and research in more than 125 countries. Award recipients are chosen for exemplary achievements and proven leadership in their fields.

Vivoni’s research activities focus on the intersection of hydrology and its allied disciplines – ecology, meteorology and geomorphology – for improving understanding of water resources in this region. He has made significant contributions to the understanding of ecohydrologic processes in semi-arid areas. In recent years, his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, NASA, The Nature Conservancy, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

During his time in Ensenada, he will be conducting atmospheric and hydrologic research related to climate change in northern Mexico. Vivoni’s Fulbright project will build upon a decade of investigation in northern Mexico with a range of collaborators from US and Mexican institutions.

“I am most interested in generating cross-border knowledge on water resources that can help both countries confront and adapt to changing land cover and climate conditions,” says Vivoni, of his upcoming trip.

Vivoni's most notable accomplishments include a 2008 U.S. Fulbright Scholar Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a Kavli Fellow, and a Leopold Leadership Fellow.

Founding Director of the Center for Meteorite Studies, Dr. Carleton B. Moore, has been inducted into the Mineralogical Society of Arizona's Hall of Fame! This award recognizes, among other things, Dr. Moore's many contributions to education and public outreach through presentations to schools and clubs in Arizona (Photo: Dr. Carleton B. Moore hosts the ASU Center for Meteorite Studies booth at the Sedona Gem & Mineral Club Annual Show. Image credit: ASU/CMS).

Dr. Moore was editor of the journal Meteoritics for 20 years. He was a member of the Lunar Sample Preliminary Examination Team for the Apollo program, and a principal investigator for the returned lunar sample program for all the Apollo missions. Dr. Moore’s research efforts have focused on the geochemistry of meteorites, lunar samples and analytical geochemical problems. Additional research interests have taken advantage of the great statistical depth present in the Center for Meteorite Studies collections, including statistical studies of meteorite compositions and homogeneity, the origin of the low calcium achondrites, trace elements in iron meteorites, and high- and low-temperature phases, including organic compounds, in carbonaceous chondrites.

Dr. Moore received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1960, and served as Founding Director of the Center for Meteorite Studies for over 40 years. In 2011, on the occasion of the Center's 50th anniversary, the ASU meteorite collection – the largest university meteorite collection in the world – was officially named the Carleton B. Moore Meteorite Collection

More than twenty-four universities and colleges launch the Inspark Science Network to improve outcomes in science courses with traditionally high failure rates

More than 200 faculty members and college presidents will discuss the future of science education and demonstrate groundbreaking technology that will power the Inspark Science Network today at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus.

Established to lead a digital revolution in science education, the Inspark Science Network was launched by Arizona State University (ASU) and Smart Sparrow to develop and share courses that will help students complete general science education courses. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $4.5 million grant to Smart Sparrow for the new initiative. Success in general science education courses has been a barrier to college completion, particularly for low-income and first-generation students.

“Having more students successfully complete college science courses is a huge benefit to our society and will strengthen our nation’s competitiveness,” said ASU President Michael Crow. “Efforts like these, which utilize technology to engage students in a more meaningful way and encourage them to learn science through the exploration of the worlds around them, will be vital in removing traditional barriers to a college degree.”

Australian technology firm Smart Sparrow, a pioneer in adaptive learning authoring platforms, will provide tools that enable faculty to create and share digital courses, with an emphasis on allowing individual educators to exert pedagogical control and track student progress using sophisticated analytics.

As part of the launch of Inspark, over 200 college and university presidents and faculty members are gathering today to demo the new technology powering the network. The day will include a panel discussion featuring President Crow, Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell, Maricopa Community Colleges Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Maria Harper-Marinick, and Director of the ASU Origins Project Lawrence Krauss.

“The Inspark Science Network will empower teachers to create learning experiences that combine the power of adaptive learning with the magic of great classroom instruction,” said Dr. Dror Ben-Naim, CEO and Founder of Smart Sparrow. “We are proud to establish a world-leading team of experts, and contribute toward creating tools that will have a lasting and significant impact on student success.”

The Inspark Science Network is an initiative of Smart Sparrow, in partnership with ASU’s newly established Center for Education Through Exploration (ETX). ETX, directed by Ariel Anbar, a President’s Professor in the School of Earth & Space Exploration and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at ASU, is an initiative designed to promote active learning, teaching science as the means by which we explore the unknown, rather than simply learning what is already known. Founding Inspark partners also include Achieving the Dream, The University of Texas at Arlington, and e*mersion, a science animation company.

With help from Achieving the Dream, a national organization focused on improving outcomes for low-income and traditionally underserved students, Inspark will produce innovative courseware and work to ensure that faculty and community colleges around the country can access the network. George Siemens, Executive Director of The University of Texas at Arlington’s Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Lab, will lead a research effort to test the efficacy of the new courses and networks.
Professor Anbar will guide the Inspark Science Network in developing “smart courses” that teach basic science concepts through the exploration of intriguing questions, placing traditional science content in a compelling context.

“We believe science is fundamental to teaching students how to be critical thinkers and successful contributors to the future of our society,” Anbar said. “This network will pull together like-minded professionals who are passionate about teaching and committed to ensuring that all students succeed.”

Representatives from community colleges across Arizona will be participating in the special events today at ASU. Among the initial twenty four teaching partners are universities and community colleges such as American Public University System, Houston Community College, Lorain County Community College, and Miami Dade College.

Arizona State University hydrologist Enrique Vivoni has been awarded a Leopold Leadership Fellowship –– a prestigious North American program focused on communicating scientific research to a wide audience. Vivoni, an associate professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, is one of 20 Leopold Leadership fellows for 2015.

Water in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico is a contentious issue that traverses disciplinary boundaries. Vivoni’s research activities focus on the intersection of hydrology and its allied disciplines (ecology, meteorology and geomorphology) for improving our understanding of water resources in this region. A hallmark of his research achievements has been the collaborative studies on the shared water resources between the U.S. and Mexico.

“I am honored to be chosen as a Leopold Fellow and I look forward to serving as a focal point for water resources issues in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico,” Vivoni said. “The leadership skills developed through the Leopold Leadership program will be useful for addressing societal needs related to water resources sustainability.”

Vivoni is internationally recognized in the fields of distributed hydrologic modeling, ecohydrology of semi-arid regions, North American monsoon studies and integration of engineering tools for advancing hydrologic science.

The Leopold Leadership Program, based at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, is a competitive fellowship for outstanding academic environmental scientists who are actively engaged in outreach to decision-makers and the public about their work. Each year, the program selects up to 20 midcareer academic environmental scientists as fellows.

The fellows were chosen for their outstanding scientific qualifications, demonstrated leadership ability, and strong interest in sharing their knowledge beyond traditional academic audiences. The fellows will receive two weeks of intensive communication and leadership training in how to deliver information about their research to journalists, policymakers, business leaders, and the public.

The Leopold Leadership Program was founded in 1998 to fill a critical gap in environmental decision-making: getting the best scientific knowledge into the hands of government, nonprofit, and business leaders and the public to further the development of sustainable policies and practices.